At the (current) top levels, you might be right. I don't think it's been going on longer than 10 years though. I'd guess maybe 5 or 6.

The bulk of engineering doesn't like this, but sadly for a while now it's been a sales-driven company, and the IBM influence has certainly not helped. Sales doesn't give a shit about the health of Linux, or even the long-term health of Red Hat. They want their commission and promotion, and pesky open-source ideological things get in the way.

How about since July 9th, 2019?

What happened then?

That's when IBM bought RedHat.

I would say at least since udev was merged into systemd and gnome adding an hard dependecy on systemd-logind [2], both in 2012 so I would say more than 10 years.

To me that this was an act to force a Redhat-led project through other Redhat-led projects.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ [2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/-/commi...

Gnome and Wayland are the last worries for any enterprise customer.

Gnome's part of the play to make it painful for other distros to avoid Systemd, which does concern ~all enterprise customers. And I'm sure some of those enterprise customers are paying for graphical workstations, besides, even if it's a minority.

[EDIT] If I'm not communicating this well, consider: if Red Hat steers several key projects that basically all other serious distros are stuck with (in no small part due to Red Hat maneuvering that sure looks like it was designed to bring this situation about on purpose), how can another vendor ever be anything more than a knock-off of Red Hat? Ubuntu tried to fight them on each of these points, and others, and lost every time. Result: if you're running Ubuntu, much of your system is defined by, and the future development of it steered by, Red Hat. You're practically running a Red Hat knock-off, aside from their dead-man-walking FlatPack competitor, Snap. May as well just pay for support from a budget RHEL vendor... oh, wait, those just got cut off, guess you'll be paying Red Hat. It dramatically increases their moat and the cost of building a credible competitor that's not basically just off-brand Red Hat with less ability to steer the future of the platform.

The funny thing is that it looks like most of the decisions leading to that outcome have been overwhelmingly coincidental.

I would be very surprised if it's a coincidence that Systemd's as difficult to avoid, if you're building a Linux distro, as it now is, nor a coincidence that it's been going NIH all over the rest of the system ever since Gnome was leveraged to speed up its adoption.

The point is to make it difficult to offer a credible enterprise Linux distro that's not full of Red Hat-steered software in key places, turning you into a cheap knock-off of Red Hat with little say in what happens to the software you're providing, in terms of future development. It now costs a lot more money to get out of Red Hat's shadow & control, as a would-be Red Hat competitor—they're not just another distro among many, they run the damn show.

systemd makes enterprise customer's lives easier. It's more reliable and it's easier to write your own units and timers than what came before.

Systemd's a lot more than an init system, and that's no accident. Red Hat now determines where Linux goes in some very important ways, and I think they believe they've finally got a solid lock on that, after years of effort, if they're making this move. Why go with a competitor (if you're a paying customer, which is who matters) that's just following in Red Hat's wake? And now, the options for RHEL-in-a-different-label will be gone. Who's left? Nobody, you're gonna pay Red Hat or eat extra (perceived, if not actual) risk.

[EDIT] Nb that for the above it doesn't even matter if Systemd's better than the pile of interchangeable daemons and programs it replaced. I have opinions on that, but it's irrelevant to Red Hat's market maneuvers, aside from that it was important to them that it not be easy & safe to cleanly replace, in part or whole.

Have you looked at 2022/23 commit logs for systemd and matched those authors to employers?

(Preview: It's mostly Microsoft, Meta and Suse.)

I think that's why this current issue is more relevant than ever. Red Hat is burning goodwill they had, which is going to eventually start to cut into the types of decisions they used to be able to make when they had more community "power". I've always enjoyed using Debian (or Debian-based) systems than Red Hat (or Red Hat-based) systems, and was unhappy when I had to re-learn init scripts, but at this point in time Systemd just seems to be easier with some features being "free" to restart or figure out systems that don't restart automatically.

You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' :)

Somewhat jaded opinion after many years in the business, but these companies exploiting OSS for profit have learnt from how Microsoft's moves have played out over the years (and are now making their own mistakes). Given the only way they make money is by providing support, obviously they're going to go the MS route (make operation arcane and complex, as per your first point).

> You missed 'deprecating the alternatives'

I don't want to disagree too hard with this, because I, too, have been uncomfortable with the march toward making it very difficult to build a Linux system without things like systemd (I actually don't have all that much of a problem with systemd anymore, but I also value choice).

But no one company can deprecate anything. The source is all there, under permissive licenses. If people want sysvinit or openrc (etc.) to work well in order to build systems without systemd (for example), they are free to maintain, support, and evangelize them. And this happens, to some degree. If it's not happening to the degree we're all happy with, then we should pitch in to help, either with our labor, or financially. Otherwise we don't really get a say.

They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow accidentally, holy shit, it shouldn't have been, because, wow, it's been a highly-successful-and-effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span of years)

Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)—it matters that any commercial competitor's only realist option, short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff—and if that's not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the same.

> Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)

Don't forget alpine is also openrc and it is far more used by corporate tech than gentoo. Especially as a base for containers.

As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to a single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid developers just by contributing their free time. But it's very hard to create such an organization without the companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as many of their proxies into said org to gain influence, and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem, we need to contend not only with whether a particular thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply what the incentives lead to unless the community has a strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day and age, that also includes dealing with all the submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that are well within the budget of any large company to try to fake organic community discourse.

That sounds a lot more like Canonical's (attempted) strategies

1) Be the defacto "new user" or "newbie friendly" distro for two decades

2) Keep making asinine attempts to monetize your users (Amazon search bar comes to mind)

3) Try to pivot and break core Linux functionality so software only works on you (Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it, Mir instead of Wayland and the horrendous amount of forking done to GTK and others to get that hideous 'Unity' desktop going)

Yes, Canonical has been their main competitor on each point and it's possible the threat of Canonical is what sent them this direction in the first place [EDIT: or vice-versa—Ubuntu may have attempted to "own" parts of their system in response to Red Hat's moves to do the same, I'm not sure how exactly that timeline works out and all I have to go on is how both have behaved].

Canonical-steered alternatives to Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland, have been advanced (as you note: Mir, Unity, Upstart) with less political and/or technical savvy than Red Hat's efforts, and have all failed. Technically they all still exist, in some form, but they're de facto dead. Snap/FlatPack is another place they're butting heads, and I think it's fair to say Snap's not got a bright future, but I guess it's technically still in the running, so we'll have to call that one undecided.

How exactly would Red Hat pursue such strategy and compete with Canonical? Consider the fact that Red Hat leaves the copyright to the contributor in Red Hat's projects, while Canonical requires contributors to sign CLA to get patches included in Canonical's projects. Given this arrangement, Canonical both benefits from the contributions and also has extra rights over the code that everyone else doesn't have that gives them a competitive advantage.

What's that got to do with maneuvering for control of extremely-important parts of Linux? If anything, license/attribution fuckery would put you at a disadvantage in that kind of a game. Red Hat was playing for position, not material, in chess terms. Canonical may have held more rights to their competing software, but it doesn't matter a bit, because those projects are irrelevant now. They "own" more, perhaps, but they're in checkmate, so it doesn't matter. Who's looking to pay the best-positioned claimant to "upstart maintainer" for support? Practically nobody, and that's not a growing market.

If you're an enterprise, do you see Canonical/Ubuntu or Red Hat as the most-credible vendor to support Systemd, which both of them are running? Is there anyone else who might hold that title? The answer to those questions are the point of what Red Hat's done (or else they've accidentally achieved a pretty amazing coup through a series of maneuvers that led to that outcome simply by chance, which notion strikes me as unlikely).

What's important is making it extremely expensive to launch or re-position a competitor distro to Red Hat that actually ships substantially-different software than Red Hat does, at a level of polish & reliability that might let you compete with them. It leaves competing distros as Red Hat followers. Which, fine if some hobbyists pick that, what they care about is being perceived as the only credible claimant to the title of first-party vendor of Linux, in most contexts by enterprise.

> I think it's fair to say Snap's not got a bright future, but I guess it's technically still in the running, so we'll have to call that one undecided.

I'm surprised they haven't thrown in the towel yet at this point.

When I read HN, I never see anything positive about snap. And while this is arguably a fringe community, it is very highly correlated with the 1% of influencers to corporate decision makers.

Agreed, I think Canonical has been a lot worse in this respect than Red Hat. I think Red Hat's technical arguments have merit, and they do a pretty good job separating projects from the company so they are definitely not RPM distro-only.

I think you can really only use this assumption if you are talking about desktop Linux. Using the Ubuntu server version is mostly giving you Debian with more packages available (and all the benefit and downsides to that).

> Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it...

False. Ubuntu switched to systemd as soon as its upstream (Debian) did.

See https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Not false :)

Ubuntu offered Upstart starting in 6.10 (2006) through 15.04 (2015) after Debian's (admittedly very politicized) switch to systemd forced their hand

RHEL 6 (2010) included it for a single release before switching to systemd in RHEL 7 (2014) (though in balance, systemd was started by a Red Hat employee)

No other distros switched to it, and the ones that offered it as an option were very second-class citizens

So, they were one year after RHEL on switching to systemd to the default (and it was available as on option before that). The first LTS version of Ubuntu released after RHEL7 had systemd as the default. I wouldn't really say that they were using it "after everyone else abandoned it". I'd characterize it more as they developed an alternative init system that never really caught on.

Indeed. And notably, upstart came long before systemd, and with it Ubuntu was the first major (or any?) distro to solve the real problem of the non-parallelized boot speed issue for desktop users. Characterising it as "pivot and break core Linux functionality" is just outright misleading.

a.k.a. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Few of us have careers long enough to remember purchasing SCO or HP-UX or similar and what that whole experience was like. We're positively blessed compared to how things were in the '90s.

Red Hat's leadership forgets what made them successful in the first place and wants those bad old days back badly.

When you're not at the top you want competition, since you are competition. When you're at the top you want to choke competition and gate as much as you can. It's a story as old as trade itself.

"Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here"

GNOME and Wayland are utterly non-strategic for most of Red Hat's business. If your theory of Red Hat's long-term strategy hinges on those being strategic, then you need to go back to the drawing board. You could fairly cite systemd, I suppose, but Wayland and GNOME not so much.

On point 3 - that's not really controversial. All the Linux vendors have tried to "be" Linux in the public market. Canonical has certainly tried to be the brand-name Linux for most users.

To the extent Red Hat has tried to steer the market w/r/t its tech stack, it's done so pretty honestly and by trying to persuade others to adopt its tech stack and by doing the work in the open. This is the opposite approach of Canonical which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over again.

Gnome and Wayland countered Ubuntu's attempts to "own" competitor projects in those areas (the current fight is Snap/Flatpack). Gnome, in particular, was important as a lever used to make it expensive for distros to avoid Systemd, forcing it into de facto standard status more quickly than it may have achieved on its own merits (if it ever would have—and maybe it would!), from which point they've started using Systemd to eat other system services & daemons, increasing their control over the platform and cementing their status as, effectively, the "first party" vendor for Linux itself—not literally the kernel, but enough of the system that you've got to go pretty far into here be dragons territory, by the standards of enterprise, at least, not to be using Red Hat-steered software in key parts of your system—so if you want a say in the direction of Linux, as you experience it, or priority bugfixes from the best-possible source, or to talk to experts who write that software for a living, for advice or training, you're short on options other than... Red Hat. Which is the whole point.

Gnome is a healthy non-profit foundation with the majority of its organizational capacity (and income) not associated with Red Hat.

Red Hat hasn't been dominant in Wayland for years. It's very much a community effort, including governance and maintainership.

systemd is currently mostly developed by employees of Microsoft, Meta and Suse, aside from I guess Frantisek.

Red Hat does a lot, and I'm sure they have thoughts about where they spend their money, but I don't think people really understand how decoupled these projects and communities are.

It's funny how people view GNOME/systemd as some sort of conspiracy rather than it just being what the people who contribute want to work on.

Corporate strategy isn't conspiracy. I think it's even weirder to think redhat would just provide resources in return of nothing at all, or that redhat employees won't be biased towards steering the ship according to their employers best interest.

Like I genuinely don't think Gnome or systemd or Fedora would just use a ubuntu/canonical-built core system even if it was superior in every way

And hey I'm not complaining, I use systemd (indirectly) and gnome almost everyday. I don't care where the software comes from, really, I'm just glad I can use it. But that doesn't mean we can't be aware of the power dynamics around it :)

What about Upstart?

It was significantly better than sysvinit and Debian, Fedora, RHEL6, OpenSUSE all adopted it. Even though it came out of Canonical.

It was replaced by Systemd because that did concurrency in the dependency management, which Upstart didn't, and was never designed to do, so was going to require a lot of rework to support.

> the current fight is Snap/Flatpack

I work with enterprise customers every day who use RHEL, it's free variants, and Ubuntu - I can promise that none of them give a single shit about Flatpak or Snap. They will never use either of them. Those tools are only relevant to Linux on the desktop - the small size of that market is exactly why both companies (mostly Canonical) have gotten away with being a nuisance on this front.

Flatpak is very relevant on the immutable OS space which is being pushed hard as the future. It is mostly an enterprise (server/vm) thing too.

I just don't see people caring about an immutable OS in the enterprise space. The central requirement is already addressed by containers, and all of the security and compliance stuff enterprises do is predicated on having a "normal" OS - even if an immutable deployment is technically more secure, that doesn't help you if your auditors can't understand whether it checks the requisite boxes.

Yeah. To me, this just seems like IBM feeling like their existing (corporate) sales funnel is big enough that the consequence of this (reducing OSS users based sales funnel) aren't going to meaningfully matter.

Or, at least they won't matter while the current decision makers are still at IBM. It could be a problem for future IBM leaders, who will probably just attempt to buy SuSE or Canonical or something at that point. ;)

GNOME was pretty instrumental in forcing systemd to becoming a GNU/Linux-wide standard though, by creating some dependencies there.

> This is the opposite approach of Canonical which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over again.

Agreed, Canonical is worse. The whole closed snap store (where only canonical can use it) is an obvious play on milking the commercial software market.

That doesn't mean that what RH is doing is great though.

> Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here

Systemd, sure, but I would assume that the vast majority of Red Hat's support contracts would be for server use, where GNOME and Wayland are irrelevant.

Gnome was a major lever in making it hard for other distros to avoid systemd, early on. The way Wayland's been structured and that... transition, such as it is, has been managed, smells a whole lot like a fire-and-motion move, and besides, dominance there was necessary to keep Mir from winning as the successor to X-Window and making it possible for Ubuntu to follow Red Hat's playbook and use it to push some of their other, deeper-in-the-stack projects (they'd have been neatly positioned to interfere with both Systemd and Gnome, had they won). I don't think Red Hat would let Ubuntu push anything of note, at this point, without countering it, for (justified!) fear of their own tactics being turned on them.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Systemd's the main body of Red Hat's army here, if you will—no doubt that's the most important part of all this—but other projects have played other important roles in supporting or defending it, at times.

It's not like Red Hat planned and schemed to execute on Wayland as a plan for domination, but their decision to support Wayland as an existing project with technical merit staffed by skilled people might well have been tactical for the reason you mention.

Some people tend to imagine the first situation and rightly dismiss it as a post facto conspiration but the second situation is utterly realistic. They may even not have realized until much later how right they got.

And I say that as someone who is convinced we need something like Wayland, the sooner the better. But we also have to avoid being naive about how business is done.

>You are Linux for much of the market. You own it. Profit.

What a twist!

So after all it wasn't Microsoft EEEing Linux, but actual "Linux Companies"?!

Microsoft tried and failed because their product is strictly inferior for the market which Linux has ended up dominating. Marketing and evil behaviour can definitely win out over technical quality, but we were fortunate that it didn't go that way in this case.

I'm not sure if that argument holds water. You have Azure which is hugely successful, and Linux is still not anywhere close to becoming a standard desktop environment beyond the type of people you find on HN. Microsoft contributes quite a bit to Linux now, because they see the future. Becoming a leader in open source gives you the ability to steer where technology goes, and Red Hat definitely was able to play that hand as well (but under IBM seems to be losing quickly).

I'm not sure that any of your post actually contradicts mine; MS have accepted the dominance of Linux in the server market and have moved on to exploiting it where they can. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have rather had everyone running on Windows, if they could have pulled it off.